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Digital Dashboards

I’m always looking for new ways to deal with information overload- Digital Dashboards are a great way to cope with that. I’ve been looking at several alternatives:

1. Pageflakes– offers users the ability to create pages of pages including RSS feeds, Alexa, the Weather forecast, etc. They offer version 2.0 of the classic "homepage" from Yahoo, etc. (Free)

2. Feedraider– offers users the ability to create pages of RSS feeds, Photos, Videos, etc- anything that is in an RSS feed. You can view by groups (like Pageflakes) or in River view- which is chronological. (Free)

3. Swamii– a new London-based perpetual search engine. You tell it what to search for, it brings you fresh results daily. (Free)

4. Spotback- a Personal news service. It learns which news you like, but you can’t tell it which sites you like.

5. Feeds 2.0 – a Personalized news service. You tell it which sites you like, it learns what you like to read. I’ve been using Feeds 2.0 for about 5 months. It really saves me lots of time by "scoring" every article across some 200 feeds I have- and presenting me with the highest ranking news based on my explict and implicit reading patterns.

5. Tailrank– Personal news servce. You tell it which sites you like, it learns what you like to read.

6. My Wall Street Journal Beta (Pay) You select various charts, sections and it shows these in dashboard format. You can also add RSS feeds.

7. MarketClusters– a pay-for site offering VC-centric business intelligence (Pay)

With so much fragmentation in what you call ‘digital life aggregation’ there is bound to be consolidation and what I call ‘composite innovation’ whereby features from several providers come under an umbrella in a seamless manner. To me that means post-merger integration skills of the highest order will be required in the firms playing the field today.

What is your view, Jason? Who will survive, who will thrive, and who will just, well, nosedive?

I like the intelligence in Feeds 2.0, which services like Netvibes don’t have. I like the spontaneity of Apple’s new widget services in the upcoming 10.5 release of Mac OS X- you can pull data from anywhere.

For now, I see no clear winners- I use a variety of tools to try to stay on top of what’s happening. Feeds 2.0 with their AI in the background makes that easier… but it doesn’t alert me if I get comment spam on this site nor does it know my favorite band has just released some new music (Last.fm).

That’s the reason behind the post- maybe there are some cool tools I’ve missed…